Category: Misc

How can you not love the protections of a quasi-govt. job? Bean counters tucked away somewhere in the bowels of UC Berkeley came across some particularly useful information for those of us putting our digits on the line for the cause of higher education. Summary:

Try not to lose the “thumb and index finger of the same hand.” You would only be entitled to 1/4 the principal sum of your traveler’s insurance. Losing four toes, on the other hand, gets you 1/2 the sum,but only if you lose those toes “through or above the metatarsophalangeal joints.”

Table of losses / payments broken down by number of digits on involved hands or feet follows.
Continue reading “Prestidigitation”

After years of heading to snopes.com to check the credibility (or non-credibility) of forwarded emails making surprising claims, and politely reminding people that not everything one reads online is true, I just got snoped. An old friend forwarded a message from a seemingly very experienced earthquake and disaster relief expert with some very credible-sounding advice. Even though the advice ran counter to what most of us learned in school (it implores people not to hide under desks or in doorways but to huddle next to large objects instead, where triangular pockets will be formed by falling rubble), all of it sounded like good sense, and the guy’s experience sounded vast. So I forwarded it on to a bunch of friends.

As it turns out, “rescue expert” Doug Copp has a less-than-sterling reputation, the Red Cross disputes that techniques that may apply in 3rd-world countries will apply in countries with very different building standards, the scientific validity of his claims is in question, and he’s currently under investigation by a U.S. Department of Justice fraud unit.

I think part of the reason the article didn’t raise a bull flag for me is that it didn’t seem like anyone had an agenda at stake, anything to gain from giving bad earthquake advice.

Lesson learned: Snopes everything.

On a recent episode of The Amazing Race, while in India, Brandon and Nicole took a “Fast Forward” that would have enabled them to leap ahead in the game. All they had to do was travel to a temple and perform an as-yet unknown Hindu ritual. But when they arrived at the temple, they balked, backed out, couldn’t bring themselves to go through with it. Why not? The ritual involved shaving their heads, and they were both models. Damn near cost them the game and a million bucks, their confounded vanity. Shoot, I was especially looking forward to seeing dorky Brandon stripped of his beautiful golden curls.

Later that night, a friend told us about an acquaintance from a family where all the women had had breast cancer. She was the only one who hadn’t. Wanting to make sure she could stick around to raise her child, she opted for a voluntary, pre-emptive, double mastectomy. Had her breasts removed even though she didn’t yet show any signs of cancer, just in case.

We all have our priorities.

Every industry has its difficult customers, its foibles, and its secret techniques for handling the squinchy corners of everyday business. Defective Yeti’s Matthew Baldwin has compiled a mini-compendium of techniques (supposedly) known only by everyday practictioners: cardboard box flatteners, actors, tech support staff, jugglers, lounge pianists…

Nurse: Patients will occasionally pretend to be unconscious. A surefire way to find them out is to pick up their hand, hold it above their face, and let go. If they smack themselves, they’re most likely unconscious; if not, they’re faking.

Slate: Why do you still need a realtor to buy a home? Why hasn’t the web done for real estate transactions what eBay has done for other exchanges? The 3-5% realtors get on both the buying and selling sides adds up to a huge chunk of change, given that the percentage hasn’t changed even as property values have shot up over the years. Agents – both buying and selling – earn tens of thousands of dollars in commission for a home sale, after putting in what generally amounts to a few days worth of work. And it’s not like realtors are magical specialists – it takes only 60 hours of training to get your realtor’s license, while it takes nearly 1,000 hours to become a hair stylist.

After all, escrow companies and home inspectors already do much of the heavy lifting in a real-estate transaction and add more value than most realtors while working for a flat fee.

In an industry with actual, healthy competition, realtor percentages would be a fraction of what they are, and would be commensurate with the amount of effort and skill put into the deal. But every effort to deflate the exaggerated traditional role of the realtor in the digital age is fought tooth and nail by the National Association of Realtors. Now the NAR is up against the DOJ for antitrust.

I’m not saying that realtors are crooks, or that there aren’t a million hidden landmines that realtors help innocent homebuyers to avoid. It’s a complex business and realtors provide an important service. But realty commissions need to enter the realm of fair competition. It’s time for the NAR to be taken down a peg.

At the J-School, we loan out tons of equipment to students and faculty – still and video cameras, projectors, laptops, minidisc recorders, microphones, etc. We’ve long struggled to find ways to keep track of everything, and to prevent items and rooms from being double-booked. There are a bunch of commercial apps out there (like ye olde Meeting Maker) designed for resource scheduling, but they’re expensive, and we’re dealing with a deep UC budget crunch.

Last week I went looking for open source solutions – just knew there had to be a free equivalent of Meeting Maker out there. Found and tried several, but settled on phpScheduleIt. We’re blown away. This app is of such high quality – cleanly designed, object-oriented, manages unlimited numbers of schedules (so we can have one for multimedia skills students, one for the radio program, one for faculty, one for booking classrooms, etc.), fine-grained permissions system… And because it’s written in PHP, I’ve been able to hack out a few features that didn’t suit our needs. Slowly but surely, I’m going to automate myself out of a job (yeah, right).

Students are back in full force and we’ve hit the ground running — yet another summer passes without touching 95% of my to-do list.

Took the final exam in my shell programming class last night – very weird to do a test like that with pencil and paper rather than into a shell, but the instructor wanted the test to be black screen, closed book. The offline approach was actually very effective, since you can’t experiment until you get it right – you have to know the material cold to be able to write scripts on paper that actually work when plugged in. Still need to write a final project script – will expand some customer provisioning I’ve done for birdhouse hosting, automate a few more housekeeping tasks.

To blow off steam, needed to do something non-shell, non-class related. Piles of misc images floating around that never get used, so decided to write an image rotator in PHP and plop some of them into the sidelines. Fun, but now that it’s there, I’m not sure I like it. We’ll see. Image is rotated once per hour, so save your reload-clicking finger. Also finally canned the calendar module – does anybody ever use those? If you think the image rotator is stupid, let me know.